Jen Pawol’s MLB debut is no PR stunt — she earned it the hard way

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ATLANTA – When Jen Pawol walks onto the field at Truist Park this weekend, she won’t just be making history — she’ll be cashing in on a decades-long grind through the most thankless job in sports.

On Saturday afternoon, Pawol will become the first female umpire to work a regular-season Major League Baseball game, handling the bases in Game 1 of the Atlanta Braves-Miami Marlins doubleheader before moving behind the plate for Sunday’s series finale.

She was sitting in a Nashville hotel room on Wednesday when the news came down.

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FILE - Home plate umpire Jen Pawol takes her position during the first inning of a spring training baseball game between the Houston Astros and Miami Marlins Sunday, March 10, 2024, in West Palm Beach, Fla.  (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson, File)

"I was overcome with emotion," Pawol told the Associated Press on Thursday. "It was super emotional to finally be living that phone call that I’d been hoping for and working towards for quite a while, and I just felt super full — I feel like a fully charged battery ready to go."

Her path here was anything but fast-tracked. Pawol began umpiring baseball in 2016 in Rookie ball, after years of calling NCAA softball games. Since then, she’s worked her way methodically through the minors — the New York/Penn League, the Midwest League, the South Atlantic League, Double-A, and finally Triple-A in 2023. That season, she became the first woman to umpire in Triple-A in 34 years and the first to work its championship game.

"This has been over 1,200 minor league games, countless hours of video review trying to get better, and underneath